I hated this book when it was the assigned text in my programming languages course. But having just graduated with a BS in CS, I went back and looked thru this book after seeing the negative reviews here. After taking courses like compiler and multi-threaded programming, I feel the book does an excellent job of showing how programming languages evolved, and why. Some of the examples are a little abstract(i agree that the quilt example is too hard to follow, and is spread over too many pages), but for a book that is trying to show the reasons languages evolved it does a good job.

Most of the previous comments are either very favourable to the book (i.e. 4 or 5 stars) or completely against it (1 star).

According to me, this book is a fantastic book IF YOU LIKE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES. These are the languages I use (from time to time) on my Linux box: AWK, Scheme, LISP, C/C++, Java, Python and Ruby. I'm also trying to understand AspectJ, Oz and Erlang. I think this book is made for persons like me who find pleasure discovering and using new programming languages (and paradigms).

I can understand that if you are a professional programmer (i.e. doing it for a living), this book is of (relatively) little value.

Personally, I love this book!

OK, so it has a stupid bear on the cover, but as far as methodical organization it actually falls in mid to upper range for books on this topic. I think it is quite reasonable as far as content, clarity, and organization. It is not overly chatty but friendly and less dry than most. It does not shy away from defining terms which some books do. The previous reviews are shockingly harsh. There is an opening for a concise easy to read book in this area and I think this book is a reasonable start.